Greenies

executive officer. But tell me something, were they on duty when you caught them?'

'No,' he said. 'They were both on sleep period.'

Brett simply shrugged. 'Well then, I guess that's their right as Martian citizens, isn't it? As long as they weren't pilfering the food, damaging anything, or otherwise endangering the ship, I say let them screw their brains out. Maybe they'll find some new positions.'

After a flabbergasted silence by the bridge crew — who had really been expecting Brett to simply explode when he heard this — laughter broke out.

'In fact,' Brett added, 'let's make that a general order for the crew. Anyone who can score themselves a companion, of either sex or creed, is free to use any storage room for sexual activity as long as they are both off duty and as long as no one needs the storage room for anything else at the moment.'

'Are you serious, Brett?' asked Sugi. 'Do you really want to put that out for the crew?'

'Fuckin aye I do,' he replied. 'It'll help boost morale. After all, a happy crew is a productive crew. We may not be the best-trained or the most experienced crew in space at the moment, but goddammit, we're gonna be the happiest.'

'I'll put it out right away,' Sugi assured him, already thinking of a certain torpedo technician that had been casting eyes at him lately.

'Of course, if there are any fights, physical altercations, or any other problems as a result of this policy, it will be rescinded immediately,' Brett qualified. 'Be sure to put that bit in as well.'

By the time Brett was finished with his first cup of coffee of the waking period, it was time for the communications link-up. The standard status report was prepared and digitized. It was roughly one third the size the standard report had always been back when Mermaid had belonged to WestHem and had been run by Commander Hoffman. Admiral Belting just didn't want to hear about all of the non-essential things that the WestHem bureaucracy had insisted upon. Belting wanted the basics: current speed, course, fuel and consumable status, and whether or not contact had been made with the enemy.

'Establishing link,' said Frank, the young communications technician. He pushed a few buttons on his computer screen and the communications laser on the top of the ship popped out of its housing and rose slowly upward on a narrow, retracting pole. The laser itself was only three millimeters in diameter. It spun on it's axis, guided by the ship's computer which was utilizing the exact positioning and attitude of the vessel so that it could hit the receiver — a two hundred meter dish — on a communications array on Phobos. Once it was in position, a window popped up on Frank's display letting him know that the laser was locked.

'Go ahead and send it,' Brett ordered.

'On the way,' Frank responded, pushing the transmit button. The laser pulsed for two and a half seconds, sending a modulated beam of light out across the emptiness of space. Nineteen minutes later, the beam struck the receiver just five meters off center and the information was encoded and sent via encrypted radio link to Admiral Belting's office. Twenty-six minutes after that, a message was returned to them, sent through space as an encrypted radio signal.

'Ok, let's see what they got for us,' said Brett, who was now on his third cup of coffee. 'Open the report and let's see where our friends are today.'

'Right,' said Frank, punching the encryption code so the message could be de-scrambled.

The computer took less than five seconds to break the code and display the information on Brett's view screen. It was another position report of the WestHem armada, updated less than three hours before. The front elements of the fleet were just on the other side of the sun, almost exactly where Sugi and Brett had plotted them out to be on their chart.

'How's it look?' Sugi asked as Brett perused the data.

'If these reports are accurate, we should be able to detect the lead elements in twelve to sixteen hours.'

There was a moment of silence on the bridge of the ship as everyone contemplated that fact. They had been out in space for weeks now, all of them knowing what their mission was, training hard for it, but at the same time, trying not to think too much about the danger of it. Well now that danger was just around the corner from them. Now it was very hard to put off thinking about it.

'Sugi, let's make sure that everyone is well fed and well rested before then, okay? Once we start tracking them, things are gonna get rankin busy around here.'

'Right Brett,' he said. 'I'll make sure.'

July 21, 2146

Deep space, near the sun

It was 0532 hours when the first detection was made. Mermaid was drifting along in her orbit, her passive sensors peering into space, paying particular attention to the area between ten and twelve million kilometers due west of the sun, along the planetary elliptic. Sugi, who had just come off of a rest period of his own, was looking at the display, waiting for it to show him something different. Finally, at long last, it did.

'Con, detection,' he said aloud, moving into formal naval procedure now that something was happening. 'I'm getting some strong flickers from bearing 296 mark 05.'

'Copy, Sugi,' said Brett, who had not had any more sleep since the last radio update. 'What do you have?'

'It's in the medium range, spread out over about two hundredths of a degree. Moving rapidly from right to left but holding on the elliptic.'

Brett nodded, already knowing what he was seeing, but he wanted to hear Sugi identify it as well. 'What's it look like to you?'

Sugi took a deep breath, hesitated for the briefest instant, and then said slowly, 'Absorption heat on the side of a spacecraft maybe?'

'Exactly,' Brett told him. 'The sun is heating that ship up mighty hot. Good call. Get it up on the display and give it a target designation. That's probably the lead ship of the armada.'

Sugi continued to track on it, fine tuning his instruments a little. Within five minutes he was able to detect other information from it as well, namely internal heat from an inertial damper and some faint radar waves, probably from the anti-meteor defense.

'Do we have an ID on it?' Brett asked.

'Computer has it as a Seattle class anti-stealth frigate. Not enough of a signature yet to identify the particular ship. And we're still bearing only at this point.'

'Okay, let's do a little maneuvering and see if we can get a range. Helm, stealth procedures in place.'

'Copy that, Brett,' Mandall replied. 'Thrusters on minimum, cooling systems on main plasma jets active.'

'Very good. I'm sounding the acceleration alarm.' He pushed a button, activating it. When it was done running through its cycle he turned on the intercom. 'All personnel,' he said, his voice broadcast throughout the ship. 'We have detected a Seattle class frigate coming around the sun. It is probably the lead element of the nice folks that we came out here to meet. We will be maneuvering at low acceleration to attempt to pin down a range on the ship. We will not, I repeat, not, be going to general quarters just yet.' He turned the intercom off. 'Helm, turn us to 270 mark 300. Once aligned begin a burn at point one G.'

The ship turned on its axis and then began to slowly accelerate, changing their orbit. The plasma ejecting from the rear was still white hot, but was cooled enough and was coming out at such a rate that the ship would remain invisible to infrared detection, especially from the distance they were at. As she moved along, and as the target of their inquiry moved along as well, Mermaid's sensors continued to collect data, everything from heat levels to Doppler shift. Within an hour an exact range and speed was pinned down.

'612,345 kilometers,' Sugi announced when the calculations were complete. 'It's on a course of 186 mark 1, moving at seventy kilometers per second. Fusion engines are idle.'

'Beautiful,' Brett said. 'And the other targets?' While they had been tracking the first target, four others had come into view and were now being tracked as well.

'I've got a tentative ID on target two as another Seattle class frigate. Target three, four, and five are still unknown.'

'Let's keep working them,' Brett said.

They kept working them and one by one the front escorts of the armada were all identified and their courses